Help build personal homeserver/NAS (around 700€)

[riri]

Hello,

I'm totaly beginner in the world of NAS. I would like to create my own TrueNas server for these use cases :
- Storage mutimedia
- Using Plex
- Have a local LLM (maybe with LM studio if it's possible)
- Having multiple little gaming servers (minecraft, valheim ...)
- Using Home Assistant (with security camera)
- Having a little web server
- And probably some other apps in the future

I'm little bit lost about the build and mainly about the CPU, I saw that it's have to be ECC for more security, and it's have to be EPT too for virtualization ...
I'm affraid to do the wrong choice and have an incompatible issue.

What could you advise me for a budget aroud of 700€/$

 

[Etorix]

For the budget (excluding drives, I assume): Used server parts, or even a whole refurbished server.
How many drives? (HDDs, SSDs for apps/VMs?) How many cores/computing power for all these apps? Transcoding or not?

 

[riri]

I think 1 NVME 250 go for the os, maybe on other nvme for the flash, and 2*4TO SSD should be enought.

For transcoding it's only usefull when we used Plex on mobile phone, right ? (and not for TV with native format)

You don't think it's possible with non used parts ? For exemple with a Intel Core i5-10400 ?

 

[Etorix]

No hard drives for the (presumably large) "multimedia storage"? That's usually the fist thing to look at for a NAS.

Buying new will stretech the budget and give you much less than what you could do with refurbished parts.
If you want to do your ZFS NAS "by the textbook", a Core i5-10400 cannot use ECC DIMM; you'd need to look at a Core i3-9100 for that. But if transcoding is not required, and thus an iGPU is not required, you should rather look at Xeon-D/E5/Scalable (and second-hand RDIMM).

May we take the i5-10400 as an indication of the required computing power (6C/12T, 2.9 GHz base)?

 

[PhilD13]

I have bought recently a Supermicro X10 server (in my signature) for right at $1200.00/tax and shipped to my door (so it was under 100 before tax and shipping). This was easily 2000.00 under what QNAP wanted for an empty 12 bay rack mount server. Except for the drives everything listed was included. I picked up the used 16x 8TB drives and 2x used ssd boot drives for about another1200 altogether to door. The system was bought from a recycler that takes used servers from large places like Walmart, refurbishes, and resells the used servers. They are not the cheapest place but they do work and are unlikely to have any major issues. They also usually have several brands to pick from. Supermicro is a good brand , but so are some of the other brands. The drives I picked up from a drive recycler. Again, not the cheapest I could find but the drives have plenty of life left in them and had a 30 day (I think) warranty on them and were already to go with no supprises. I tested the entire system, memory, drives, cpu, and then the entire system under sustained load for a week and it was fine. Truenas Scale has been running just fine on the hardware with no supprises or hardware issues.

Do you need as much hardware power as I bought? probably not and I didn't either but the price and availability at the time was right. There are plenty of good companies selling good used systems for good prices. Don't fall into the trap of thinking of needing the latest greatest xyz processor with the latest everything else. These latest systems sometimes cause lots of issues at first. go used with a reasonably recent server and you should be happy.

@riri I have a question for you. Home assistant with security cameras. How does that work? Interested in finding out more info.